STEFANO OLIVA :: LOOKING AT THE FUTURE THROUGH THE WORDS OF SIMONE WEIL

STEFANO OLIVA – ROBERTO PAURA :: SIMONE WEIL. DIECI IDEE PER IL FUTURO (Futura Editrice, 2025)

We are publishing the contributions of Stefano Oliva and Roberto Paura, editors of the volume *Simone Weil: Ten Ideas for Tomorrow* (Simone Weil, Dieci idee per domani), on Collettiva.it and in the program *Uomini e Profeti* (Radio 3 Rai). https://www.raiplaysound.it/audio/2025/01/Uomini-e-Profeti-del-18012025-2111ee3d-6480-4edd-8587-53235ea42218.html

STEFANO OLIVA : “A unique figure in the French labor movement of the first half of the twentieth century, Simone Weil (1909–1943) is also one of the most recognizable philosophical voices in contemporary thought. Despite growing interest, evidenced by the numerous recent publications dedicated to her, it still seems challenging to synthesize the social and political dimensions of Weil’s thought with her metaphysical and religious inspiration.

The volume *Simone Weil: Ten Ideas for Tomorrow* (Futura Editrice, pp. 207, €15) moves precisely in this direction, offering a journey that spans ontology and epistemology, aesthetics and reflections on technology, social vision, political thought, and spiritual meditation. The book does not aim to provide a complete and definitive reconstruction of the author’s profile—a goal successfully pursued by other works—but instead arranges the ten ideas mentioned in the title in a specific order, capable of guiding a perspective toward the future.

Realism, science, beauty, technology, mysticism; and further: work, decreation, force, slavery, and, precisely, the future. These are entries in an ideal “Weilian dictionary” that seeks to answer a question: What does Simone Weil have to tell us about the future of our civilization? This is not about relevance: Simone Weil was untimely in her era just as she is in ours; she belongs to another time, which is not situated in the past but in a possible tomorrow. Her entire reflection was aimed at imagining “a transformation that opens the way to another civilization,” and in this effort, seemingly distant themes contribute to outlining a project for the world to come.

Ideas that might appear highly heterogeneous (what do the conditions of assembly line workers have to do with the mystical encounter between Creator and creature?) converge in outlining a prophetic vision aimed at overcoming the impasse in which our current state of perpetual crisis seems to trap us.

Without fear of bordering on paradox or contradiction, Weil points us toward a path of material, social, and spiritual progress that marks a reversal of some of the most grandiose and failed myths of modernity: the idea of a science capable of explaining all reality in quantitative and measurable terms; the reduction of all purpose to profit maximization; the primacy of subjectivity and, in the legal realm, of individual rights; the private and personal nature of religious faith.

Against these commonplaces, Weil’s ideas—those for which she spent her very life—help us envision a different way of knowing and passionately adhering to the heartrending beauty of the *logos* inscribed in nature; they teach us to reclaim the distinction between technical means and human ends, and to value the impersonal dimension as the truly sacred element within every person; they push us to recognize the ethical bond hidden in the notion of obligation and to reaffirm the need to ground politics in a religious sense that cannot be reduced to institutional or denominational adherence.

It is this originality of thought that explains the continuous rediscovery of Simone Weil. An initial phase, in the post-World War II period, saw Adriano Olivetti’s *Edizioni di Comunità* publish Weil’s first texts, focusing on her political and labor thought: it was immediately clear that Simone Weil, despite her initial alignment with French communism, belonged to another dimension (her famous dispute with Trotsky is well-known), which is not even the strictly anarchic one with which she has more recently been categorized; yet, she had much to say about the emancipation of workers from the social oppression of mechanization, a thought that proved fundamental in labor struggles over the years.

Later, the emergence of her mystical and spiritual writings, which surprised even those who knew her well but had not grasped the depth of her conversion, represented a challenge to Christian dogmatism and found unexpected readers, including popes from Paul VI to Benedict XVI. In this Jewish thinker (who never felt Jewish yet also refused to enter the Church, remaining “on the threshold”), they likely saw a challenge to Christian thought. Her final years, in which mystical reflection merged with a choice of privations that led to her untimely death, made her a kind of *alter Christus* who, like Walter Benjamin’s *Angelus Novus*, observes our present from the “world to come.”

In more recent times, alongside these two primary interpretations—the political and the religious—new readings have emerged, restoring to Weil’s thought its freshness, complexity, and prophetic nature. Beauty as an unprecedented aesthetic key to interpreting the world; decreation, a concept drawn from Jewish thought that in Weil becomes a tool for decentering the human in the era we call the Anthropocene, easing the weight with which we continue to crush the Earth; the critique of “algebraic” science, goal-oriented and leading to dehumanizing technology, which anticipates modern discussions of algorithmic society; force understood as the drive to subjugate the universe, yet inevitably resulting in submission and defeat, both for those who wield it and those who endure it—an idea that offers a new interpretive key for the “piecemeal Third World War.”